Susto

Tommy Archuleta's collection drifts between the dreamlike and the grounded, offering both solace and unease. The speaker is an orphan who has nonetheless been mothered more fully than most. The poems follow the body, and then the soul, along the path it takes after leaving the body, and they are rooted in the high desert of northern New Mexico, the poet's home. That landscape is as quiet as it is cruel, and it carries the history of the region's colonization, along with the subjugation of the Anasazi descendants who lived there by the poet's Spanish forebears. Loss runs through every section, but the book is more than a sustained lament. It works as a family album pulled from the ground, a diary that has finally been opened, and a tribute to motherhood in its many forms. It also serves as a guide to readying oneself for a peaceful death and as an introduction to curanderismo, the traditional practice of preparing plants and roots to treat physical and mental ailments.